The Queen Agreed to Set Aside Reserves for the Indians

The second part of the land deal was that, in return for "surrendering" all their land to Canada, the queen agreed to set aside reserves for the Indians. Treaty 3 set the amount of land to be reserved at no more than one square mile for each family of five, or in that proportion for smaller or larger families.... One square mile per family of five remained the standard for reserve lands in the subsequent numbered treaties. Given that this worked out to considerably less than 5 per cent of the lands "surrendered," it can hardly be regarded as a generous allotment, particularly when one takes into account the third element of the land deal: access to the 95 per cent-plus of the "surrendered" lands outside the reserves.

--Peter H. Russell, Canada's Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 184.